


Waste

by hyakinthos



Category: Zero Escape: Virtue's Last Reward - Fandom
Genre: F/M, Pining, Pre-Canon, finish the game first, mentions of death and dead bodies, no worse than canon, poor tenmyouji
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-03
Updated: 2015-02-03
Packaged: 2018-03-10 06:25:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 788
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3280070
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hyakinthos/pseuds/hyakinthos
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When he found her, it would be the same giggling naiveté and soft smiles from their youth.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Waste

She was the love of his life, right? Childhood friends and all that. They'd shared everything together for years when they were smaller and everything was still good. His sense of childish wonder had expired, but he had always told himself that she wouldn't have. When he found her, it would be the same giggling naiveté and soft smiles from their youth.

  
It had been just like that for a little while in Nevada, too. She'd left a sorely-needed bright spot wherever she went. Ticking clocks and adrenalin, even death itself didn't daunt her or water her down.

  
That wasn't the whole truth.

  
But still, no matter how far she'd gone for selfish pursuits, she hadn't done anything that strayed from a very slightly strained moral gray area, and she had to be the same Akane. She was still sweet and kind and driven like she'd always been.

  
So when he'd gone to chase her, there was no problem in putting her on a little bit of a pedestal. She was beautiful, even more so than she had been at twelve (widely considered the prettiest girl in the seventh grade) and now he knew that she had a mind to match. She was brilliant.

  
Time went by, and Junpei couldn't help but doubt himself a little. It waxed and waned. It had to be worth it to find her, if only to sit her down and ask her a few questions! He wanted to know more, what had happened to her consciousness between her death and the present, why had she gone on the run, how she felt about him?

  
Maybe she'd have ideas about the outbreak, maybe they could just play Scrabble and have dinner while they were both still living at normal speed. About a year and a half after she disappeared, spending more than a few hours with her wasn't even the primary goal anymore. He just wanted answers, and he had so many questions.

  
The outbreak turned to an epidemic, and then it evolved into a pandemic faster than Junpei could have figured out the distinction between the two words. Bodies piled. He examined them carefully at a safe distance, but she was, miraculously, nowhere that he looked.

  
He missed her most in those days. He missed her intellect. He missed the way she could make the worst of situations look sunny again.

  
He had to find her before Radical-6 did, and lucky for him he lasted longer than the disease. Another question tacked itself to the end of his list: had she survived? It was too late to give up looking for her then, and as he turned to digging through piles of scrap, he found himself calling her name every now and again. He asked around for her wherever he went. Eventually he started expecting disappointment.

  
He aged, everyone does, but not the image he carried of her. She was still 22 and innocent in his mind, and she looked the same in every dream he had of meeting her again. She kept him going.

  
While hunting for scrap metal on the side of a disused road one night, he heard a baby crying and Akane was put to the side. Over the years, he almost completely stopped asking after her when he met new people. It would have gone on, and maybe he could have forgotten what was now not even a person in his head, but a magic bullet, a bastion of hope and youth and all that used to be right about the world. It could have stopped. Maybe he would have been happier that way.

  
When Quark was eleven, he would recount in the future, they received an invitation to come to the moon and see Akane, Of course, Junpei had no idea why, but he couldn't keep from being curious.

  
It was, he would say, the worst decision he ever made.

  
And at the end of it, there she stood. She kept her back straight, he remembered that about her, and even though she was practically dripping with sweat she looked immaculately composed. She could have sat down to dinner with royalty that very instant.

  
The things she said were cold and horrible.

  
He needed somebody to speak up, anybody, but they were all just as frozen as he was in that moment. The only thing to keep the ringing in his ears down was the slow whirring of the large fan at the front of the garden.

  
She had never been anything like he had thought she was.

  
Junpei figured that it wouldn't be quite fair to think like he'd been lied to. His was a wasted life, and it wasn't anybody's fault but his own.

**Author's Note:**

> I hope you enjoyed!


End file.
